After an All Hands Meeting last week I was pretty curious about a new term I hadn’t really heard of before.  That term was “Catalytic Coaching.”  What the heck is Catalytic Coaching?

Well, I did a little homework on the subject to share with everyone.  Catalytic Coaching is a method of professional/personal development using feedback where the coach is getting the feedback from those being coached.  Wikipedia wasn’t too much help on this topic, but I did find a guy who wrote extensively on the topic in his book titled Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review.  The author is Garold Markle.  His hard cover is kind of pricey ($119.00) but luckily the paperback and kindle copy run around $20.00 if you’d like to buy it to read more about the subject.

Good book on Catalytic Coaching

He presents the concept of Catalytic Coaching in a way where it’s an alternative to the all too dreaded “Performance Reviews” we’ve come to look forward to every year (yes I am being sarcastic).  Suffice it to say, the concept of spending time with a manager to have a discussion with you about the work you do and the progress you’d like to make would be daunting regardless of how you label the conversation, i.e. “Performance Review” or “Catalytic Coaching Session.”

Is this simply a relabeling of the same old process of doing performance evaluations so that management can assign a monetary value to your past performance and how it may impact your future performance?  I was pretty skeptical at the All Hands Meeting last week, thinking, “okay, so here’s another play on words. . .”  but hold on a sec. It turns out Catalytic Coaching is an authentic, bonafide methodology being used by some of the most influential and productive small, medium and large companies today.

Okay, so is there really something to this Catalytic Coaching thing?  Yes, there is, and here are the A,B,C’s on why:

A. Catalytic coaching puts the typically “reviewed” employee in the driver seat by giving the employee an opportunity to voice input on where they are and where they would like to go.  This is different from “performance reviews” because instead of dwelling on where you’ve been, it puts the emphasis on where you are headed.

B. Management is no longer in a judgement capacity on gauging value via performance. They are now the ones being judged based on their role in your success.  Either they are a great manager and really show some interest in you and your development, or they suck!  And no one wants a lame boss!

C. You get a personal development plan.  What the heck is a personal development plan?  It really is what ever you’d like it to be.   Our CEO mentioned at the All Hands that it’s your custom plan to be where you want to be in the next year to 5 years using your Manager as a guide, and the resources available at your company as your tools.  So it’s not just rhetoric, it’s actually a written roadmap where you identify your tools, your guides to get you to your destination, and where you give input on the quality of your support and resources.   And if you don’t make the kind of progress you wanted, then the company is at fault for failing you, not the other way around! Whoa!  This is what I call a MAJOR paradigm shift!

D. Ever been in a stewardship? Me neither. But that’s the fourth big mental whammy being dished up with the concept of Catalytic Coaching.  You enter into a “Stewardship” with your company.  What does this mean?  Well, a stewardship is a relationship we enter into with our environments so that you are taking care in making sure our environment is being protected, preserved and well managed.  Ever hear the catch phrase “stewards of good will”?  Take that idea and replace “good will” with “good careers” and I think you get the picture.  I love the concept of entering into a Stewardship with ProSync, because there’s nothing better then knowing my company’s got my back.

So there you have it, the A,B,C’s of catalytic coaching.  This is one topic that isn’t going away, so keep an eye out for some more articles on this subject in next month’s newsletter and our future ProSync website news feeds.